The Eastern Romance languages developed from the Proto-Romanian language, which in turn developed from the Vulgar Latin spoken in a region of the Balkans which has not yet been exactly determined, but is generally agreed to have been a region north of the JireÃÂek Line.
That there was language contact between Latin or Vulgar Latin speakers and speakers of indigenous Paleo-Balkan languages in the area is a certainty; however, it is not known which Paleo-Balkan language or languages comprise the substratal influence in the Eastern Romance languages.
In addition to vocabulary items, some other features of Eastern Romance, such as phonological features and elements of grammar (see Balkan sprachbund) may also be from Paleo-Balkan languages.
Older Romanian etymological dictionaries tended to assume a borrowing in many cases, usually from a Slavic language or from Hungarian, but etymological analysis may show that, in many cases, the direction of borrowing was from Romanian to the neighboring languages. The current DicÃÂionar explicativ (DEX) published by the Romanian Academy continues to list many words as borrowings, though the work of other linguists (Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga, Ivan Duridanov, et al.) may indicate that a number of these are in fact indigenous, from local Indo-European languages.
Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others. There are no significant surviving written examples of the Dacian language, so it is difficult to verify in most cases whether a given Romanian word is actually from Dacian or not. Many of the pre-Roman lexical items of Romanian have Albanian parallels, and if they are in fact substratum words cognates with the Albanian ones, and not loanwords from Albanian, it indicates that the substrate language of Romanian may have been on the same Indo-European branch as Albanian.
The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev developed the theory that the Romanian language has a "Daco-Moesian" language as its substrate, a hypothesized language that according to him had a number of features which distinguished it from the Thracian language spoken further south, across the Haemus range.
According to Romanian historian , there are supposedly over 160 Romanian words of Dacian origin, representing, together with derivates, 10% of the basic Romanian vocabulary. But through the scantly documented Dacian linguistic material such origin can't be proven. Attested Dacian plant names that were collected by Dioscorides and Pseudo-Apuleius do not belong to the Romanian lexicon.
Below is a list of Romanian words of possible pre-Roman origin. Some early scholars have speculated that they are of Dacian origin, but there is no evidence for it. A number of the words are clear loanwords from attested languages.
Some Romanian words of non-Latin origin are also found in Slavic languages, which loaned them from Eastern Romance speakers. An example is vatrà(home or hearth), which Eastern Romance speakers borrowed from the Tosk Albanian form ('hearth'), and thereafter spread to the Serbo-Croatian, Carpathian highlander dialects of Polish and Ukrainian and other neighboring languages, though acquiring in those languages a slightly modified meaning ('fire' instead of 'hearth'). Another one is Bryndza, a type of cheese made in Eastern Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic (Moravian Wallachia), Slovakia and Ukraine, the word being derived from the Romanian word for cheese (brânzÃÂ).